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Read Russia 2nd pass:Layout 1 5/2/12 1:03 AM Page 31
B a s i l e u s / 31
In the doctor’s surgery Basileus changed his tack: decanted onto the
metal table, he clawed the standard sheet in under himself and huddled up
into a furry bundle. The local Dr. Doolittle looked more like a plumber (the
brown moustache reminiscent of a thin crust from a Borodinsky loaf had associations
with the sniffing of dark rye bread after the drinking of vodka): the
first thing he did was examine Ertel from head to foot, apparently remaining
satisfied with his impressions. Nurses were summoned, smelling very
strongly of very different perfumes and talking very loudly among themselves.
First of all (with a terrible uproar of mewing and hissing) Baliseus’s
dislocated joint was put back in; then, with the cat totally exhausted and too
weak to resist, an entire syringe of thick, beastly blood that colored the test
tube like oil was drawn out of him for analysis: then, pressing the cat down
against the table, they did something else. Ertel paid. A nurse tapped the
end of her shiny pen against her square front teeth and wrote out the bill,
Ertel went to the cash desk and then, with his prescriptions, was directed to
the veterinary pharmacy located right there, in an appendix of the corridor:
it was permeated with a stupefying smell of dry cat foods and decorated with
a round aquarium filled with sour liquid that resembled cabbage soup. On
Ertel’s return to the doctor’s surgery an additional bill was waiting for him—
and in order to carry out an ultrasound check, they had shaved generous
areas of Basileus’s belly and side, so that the cat looked like a gnawed corn
cob. Ertel paid again, without bothering to count the change this time; he
paid as if he was frozen to the bone and heating the stove with money. Meanwhile
Basileus’s shaved areas were painted with an antiseptic solution that
stained the fur around the bald patches green with its chemical herb.
“He’ll soon be as right as rain!” the vet declared when he saw how upset
Ertel looked—Ertel had no idea how he was going to deal with this punkish
green embellishment when the time came to mount the artifact.
Weighed down with a bag of medicines, a bag of dietetic foodstuff and
Basileus himself, who peered out through the bars of the travelling basket
with inkwell-wide eyes, Ertel walked out onto the porch. The April ultraviolet
had bleached the concrete harshly and the steps looked sharp enough to slice
open the sole of a shoe. The naked, calloused apple trees glinted like metal
and sitting on the nearest one was a blue-back raven—the genuine article,
solid-cast with fur trimming round its iron beak, God only knew how it had
turned up in the center of Moscow. Lost in admiration, for a moment Ertel
forgot about the cat. The raven picked its nose with its foot, extended its
wings with a lazy movement, as if for a coat that had been held up behind it,